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Historically, design focused on ‘the giving of form and meaning,’ taking place in design studios, workshops or laboratories. Grown from a traditional craft (artisan) activity, design was often about creative problem solving. Meanwhile technology has been advancing, allowing designers to create highly complex interactive and intelligent products and systems in our everyday life. Through these new technological possibilities, new design opportunities can be explored. In our society we are currently facing a number of complex major challenges e.g., healthy living, the economic recession, safety and attaining a sustainable level of energy and material consumption. Disruptive innovations are needed to create structural and sustainable societal change to face these challenges. In many cases these innovations cannot be obtained through traditional problem-solving design approaches. This brings new challenges for modern designers and inevitably entails questions about design, the role of the designer and the design process. In this conceptual paper, we describe our proposal for a new craftsmanship of the designer, based on taking the design process into the wild towards real people in their own environments. By using a Research through-Design approach we see new roles for designers and accompanying crafts, competencies and design processes.

Current complex electronic products are designed and developed by multi-disciplinary teams of stakeholders, and they are sold to customers world-wide who are often overwhelmed with the complexity of products. Product creation processes lack information about product usage and user experience in the field. This information deficit clearly has a negative effect on current and future product creation, but also on the entire business development. Prior approaches to acquire usage data via logging, extensive prototype evaluation, and market research studies, miss benefits of connected and rich information. In this thesis, new technology is researched and developed to bridge this gap and to reveal actual customer needs and expectations. This thesis first presents a theoretical approach to remote data collection that begins with "observables" within complex electronic products. It is shown how high-quality information about usage and context of products in the field can be obtained from these observables; precisely the information that is meaningful to stakeholders. It is described how additional local processing and semantics have to be applied in a stakeholder-friendly way such that desired information can be extracted. Finally, data quality can be further improved by jointly collecting objective and subjective data, that is, what users do and why they do it, in a structured way. Building on the previously described theoretical approach to remote data collection we pursued a generic framework that illustrates how operational observation systems can be created, including a dedicated development process and a run-time system architecture. This enables low-impact, real-time data collection on the one hand, and, on the other hand, allows stakeholders to visually specify observation and data analysis with a graphical language. The extensive body of knowledge about the domain of observation has also been captured in models, design patterns, and ontologies that allows for reuse

High frequency ice flow measurements during speed-up events in Gornergletscher, Switzerland, revealed intriguing ice motion which has never been reported in detail before. During the summer 2005, more than a 100% flow speed increase was observed three times at four GPS stations installed across Gornergletscher. The speed-ups were accompanied by a decimeter scale surface uplift. Two of the events were triggered by intensive surface melt and rainfall, while the third one was due to the outburst of Gornersee, a glacier-dammed lake located 2 km upglacier. An interesting observation was ice motion deviating toward the side margins during the events. As the glacier accelerated, a transverse (cross glacier) velocity component was generated, turning the flow direction away from the central flow line toward the margins. When the glacier decelerated, the transverse velocity component reversed so that the ice flowed back to the azimuth of the initial flow direction. In the most significant case, the trajectory of the survey stake deviated from the original track by 0.2 m in the transverse direction. We hypothesize that the observed lateral ice motion was caused by locally elevated subglacial water pressure. When the ice sole decoupled from the bed at a part of the glacier, a point source of vertical displacement was transmitted to the surface through viscous ice. This caused the transverse as well as vertical surface motion, as observed in ground motion during magma intrusion. The hypothesis was tested with a two-dimensional ice flow model applied to the transverse glacier cross section. The model confirmed that the surface ice would move toward the margins as observed in Gornergletscher, if subglacial water pressure exceeded the ice overburden pressure over a limited part of the bed.

During the 2004 outburst flood of Gornersee, Switzerland, we observed surface microseismic activity (so-called icequakes) near the glacier-dammed lake on Gornergletscher. Using surface waves, we located near-surface tensile fracturing events by inverting time delays using a quasi-Newton scheme. We located 8520 near-surface events with uncertainties of less than 10 m. Seismic activity increased during the lake drainage, and the icequake epicenters migrated downglacier. Furthermore, we identified events whose fault plane orientations are nearly perpendicular to the local pattern of surface crevassing. These observations can be explained by the rotation of principal strains at the glacier surface deduced from local ice flow measurement which occurred during the flotation of the ice dam at the onset of the lake drainage. In general, we suggest that our technique is a useful tool to locate large data sets of microseismic events and can be used to monitor the temporal evolution of fracture processes and their dependence on glacier flow and glacier hydrology.

High frequency ice flow measurements during speed-up events in Gornergletscher, Switzerland, revealed intriguing ice motion which has never been reported in detail before. During the summer 2005, more than a 100% flow speed increase was observed three times at four GPS stations installed across Gornergletscher. The speed-ups were accompanied by a decimeter scale surface uplift. Two of the events were triggered by intensive surface melt and rainfall, while the third one was due to the outburst of Gornersee, a glacier-dammed lake located 2 km upglacier. An interesting observation was ice motion deviating toward the side margins during the events. As the glacier accelerated, a transverse (cross glacier) velocity component was generated, turning the flow direction away from the central flow line toward the margins. When the glacier decelerated, the transverse velocity component reversed so that the ice flowed back to the azimuth of the initial flow direction. In the most significant case, the trajectory of the survey stake deviated from the original track by 0.2 m in the transverse direction. We hypothesize that the observed lateral ice motion was caused by locally elevated subglacial water pressure. When the ice sole decoupled from the bed at a part of the glacier, a point source of vertical displacement was transmitted to the surface through viscous ice. This caused the transverse as well as vertical surface motion, as observed in ground motion during magma intrusion. The hypothesis was tested with a two-dimensional ice flow model applied to the transverse glacier cross section. The model confirmed that the surface ice would move toward the margins as observed in Gornergletscher, if subglacial water pressure exceeded the ice overburden pressure over a limited part of the bed.

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In today's continuously changing markets newly developed products often do not meet the demands and expectations of customers. Research on this problem identified a large gap between developer and user expectations. Approaches to bridge this gap are to provide the developers with better information on product usage and to create a fast feedback cycle that helps tackling usage problems. Therefore, the user interface of the product, the central point of human-computer interaction, has to be instrumented to collect accurate usage data which serves as basis for further improvement steps. This paper presents a novel engineering approach that combines model-driven user interface development and flexible instrumentation with runtime monitoring. In its application, it enables observation integration into products which provides comprehensive data about usage and thus allows for fast feedback cycles and consequently increased software quality. A case-study demonstrates the applicability of this approach.

BACKGROUND: The CD4 cell count at which combination antiretroviral therapy should be started is a central, unresolved issue in the care of HIV-1-infected patients. In the absence of randomised trials, we examined this question in prospective cohort studies. METHODS: We analysed data from 18 cohort studies of patients with HIV. Antiretroviral-naive patients from 15 of these studies were eligible for inclusion if they had started combination antiretroviral therapy (while AIDS-free, with a CD4 cell count less than 550 cells per microL, and with no history of injecting drug use) on or after Jan 1, 1998. We used data from patients followed up in seven of the cohorts in the era before the introduction of combination therapy (1989-95) to estimate distributions of lead times (from the first CD4 cell count measurement in an upper range to the upper threshold of a lower range) and unseen AIDS and death events (occurring before the upper threshold of a lower CD4 cell count range is reached) in the absence of treatment. These estimations were used to impute completed datasets in which lead times and unseen AIDS and death events were added to data for treated patients in deferred therapy groups. We compared the effect of deferred initiation of combination therapy with immediate initiation on rates of AIDS and death, and on death alone, in adjacent CD4 cell count ranges of width 100 cells per microL. FINDINGS: Data were obtained for 21 247 patients who were followed up during the era before the introduction of combination therapy and 24 444 patients who were followed up from the start of treatment. Deferring combination therapy until a CD4 cell count of 251-350 cells per microL was associated with higher rates of AIDS and death than starting therapy in the range 351-450 cells per microL (hazard ratio [HR] 1.28, 95% CI 1.04-1.57). The adverse effect of deferring treatment increased with decreasing CD4 cell count threshold. Deferred initiation of combination therapy was also associ

Alpine glaciers have suffered major losses of ice in the last century. We compute spatially distributed seasonal mass balances of four glaciers in the Swiss Alps (Grosser Aletschgletscher, Rhonegletscher, Griesgletscher and Silvrettagletscher) for the period 1865 to 2006. The mass balance model is forced by daily air temperature and precipitation data compiled from various long-term data series. The model is calibrated using ice volume changes derived from five to nine high-resolution digital elevation models, annual discharge data and a newly compiled data set of more than 4000 in situ measurements of mass balance covering different subperiods. The cumulative mass balances over the 142 year period vary between -35 and -97 m revealing a considerable mass loss. There is no significant trend in winter balances, whereas summer balances display important fluctuations. The rate of mass loss in the 1940s was higher than in the last decade. Our approach combines different types of field data with mass balance modeling to resolve decadal scale ice volume change observations to seasonal and spatially distributed mass balance series. The results contribute to a better understanding of the climatic forcing on Alpine glaciers in the last century.

The complicated user interfaces and complex functionality of nowadays interactive products lead to a new class of failures: People do not understand their products and thus fail to use them successfully; many products are returned for which no detectable errors can be found. These field problems of interactive products cannot be found by traditional testing methods. Industry needs reliable and structured information about the users' behavior to get understanding about the root cause of so called soft product failures. In this paper we present a framework that helps usability and quality experts to derive user models from product observation. This is supported by a novel visual language for specification what should be observed and how collected data is represented, and a system architecture for distributed self-observing systems. This approach separates the concern definition of observation from the implementation of observation facilities.

Nowadays, complex electronic products, such as DVD players or mobile phones, offer a huge number of functions. As a consequence of the complexity of the devices, customers often have problems to use such products effectively. For example, it has been observed that an increasing number of technically sound products is returned due to, e.g., interaction problems. One possible root cause of this problem is that most product development processes are still too technologydriven, i.e., potential users are brought into contact with the product only at a very late stage. If early consumer tests are carried out, then these typically aim at abstract market evaluations rather than formulating concrete requirements towards the functionality of the product. As a result, products often have little meaning or relevance to the customers. Therefore, we need better ways to involve users in the development of such products. This can be achieved by observing product usage in the field and incorporating the gained knowledge in the product creation process. This paper proposes an approach to build automatic observation modules into products, collect usage data, and analyze these data by means of process mining techniques exploiting a novel semantic link between observation and analysis. This link yields two main benefits: (i) it adds focus to the potential mass of captured data items; and (ii) it reduces the need for extensive post-processing of the collected data. Together, these two benefits speed up the information feedback cycle towards development.

Nowadays interactive electronics products offer a huge functionality to prospective customers, but often it is too huge and complex to be grasped and used successfully. In this case, customers obviate the struggle and return the products to the shop. Also the variability in scope and features of a product is so large that an up-front specification becomes hard if not impossible. To avoid the problem of an inadequate match between customer expectations and designer assumptions, new sources of product usage information have to be developed. One possibility is to integrate observation functionality into the products, continuously involving real users in the product development process. The integration of such functionality is an often overlooked challenge that should be tackled with an appropriate engineering methodology. This paper presents on-going work about a novel design for observation approach that supports early observation integrations and enables the cooperation with various information stakeholders. We show how observation can be embedded seamlessly in a model-driven development process using UML. An industrial case-study shows the feasibility of the approach.

The tongue of Gornergletscher, Valais, Switzerland, is supplied by ice originating from the highest regions of the Monte Rosa massif.Substantial portions of this ice are still below the pressure melting point in the glacier tongue.To map the distribution of the cold-temperate transition surface (CTS), extensive field campaigns have been carried out over the last years. As has been demonstrated for other glaciers, the position of the cold-temperate transition surface is a long-term integrating indicator of changing climatic conditions.Ice-penetrating radar surveys were used to map ice thickness and determine bedrock topography at 3 and 40 MHz. The 40 MHz data displays a thick layer of low backscatter in the center of the glacier.This zone is clearly present in all seven cross profiles over a along-glacier distance of several kilometers.Based on data sets of borehole temperature measurements and glacier dynamics, we interpret this zone of low backscatter as a core of cold ice, advected from the accumulation region of Grenzgletscher into the tongue of Gornergletscher.On Gornergletscher, along our profiles the CTS can be found in a maximum depth of about 180 m and extends laterally about 300-400 m, about 1/3 of the whole width. The migration of the CTS depends on surface ablation, heat flow related to temperature gradients, and advection of cold ice from upstream regions.We analyse the current state of the CTS, laying the baseline for future observations, and provide estimates for the expected future development.

We compared motor imagery performance of normally limbed individuals with that of individuals with one or both hands missing since birth (i.e., hand amelia). To this aim, 14 unilaterally and 2 bilaterally amelic participants performed a task requiring the classification of hands depicted in different degrees of rotation as either a left or a right hand. On the same task, 24 normally limbed participants recapitulated previously reported effects; that is, that the hand motor dominance and, more generally, a lifelong use of hands are important determinants of left-right decisions. Unilaterally amelic participants responded slower to hands corresponding to their absent, compared with their existing, hand. Moreover, left and right hand amelic participants showed prolonged reaction times to hands (whether left or right) depicted in unnatural orientations compared with natural orientations. Among the bilateral amelics, the individual with phantom sensations, but not the one without, showed similar differentiation. These findings demonstrate that the visual recognition of a hand never physically developed is prolonged, but still modulated by different rotation angles. They are further compatible with the view that phantom limbs in hand amelia may constrain motor imagery as much as do amputation phantoms.